by Nadia Ramoutar MMM Communications Coordinator                          Ireland      13.12.2025

This year I got an opportunity to write a Children’s Christmas play. It came about in the unusual way that someone else who was supposed to do it, didn’t do it and a friend of mine was left in a bind. She asked me somewhat desperately to help her back in September. I naively agreed.

Months later, the play is written and the children are almost ready for the main stage. It is a joy to see words that you wrote come out of a young person’s mouth but it also shows how vulnerable we all are. How we can find ourselves repeating from a script someone else wrote for us? What messages are we sending to the world and what messages have we internalised through the noise of culture?

And when it comes to the Christmas holidays, it does feel like things speed up in a less than positive way. It’s as if the world is caught up in a script that says “Buy more, hurry up, rush around, eat more, drink more, and be worried that nothing is enough.” The traffic is heavier, people are short tempered, the shops are full and the true meaning of Christmas seems to somehow have gotten lost in the marketing.

When we step back, we see that the unlikely gift of Jesus to the world is a story that we tell each year over and over. The joy of it illuminates us and brings us comfort. We can feel the hope in the small boys arrival amidst the least privileged of circumstances to a young and nervous mother who has been shunned by the world. It can’t have been an easy moment. Yet it is exactly in that imperfect scenario that the world was forever changed and the impact of that scene continues to impact our hearts and lives today.

So when the time comes for us to celebrate Christmas can we carefully check what script we are reading from? Can we decide to slow things down and say no to the demands of a society out of control? Can we set aside the modern commercialism and pressure of perfectly wrapped parcels and ideal outfits? Can we overlook the food to see the faces of those we love around the table?

Because the greatest gift of Christmas without a doubt is just that – to be in the presence of love, whether we deserve it or not.